Parents Turn Up The Heat

ANDREW JULIENCourant Staff Writer

Many Americans have drifted away from the institutions that traditionally define status - the churches they attended, the neighborhoods they grew up in, the companies they worked for. Today's mothers are finding a new way to measure success: their children. And the kids are feeling the pressure.

Schneider is a pediatrician who treats adolescents in the upscale suburb of Greenwich, where the average home costs $900,000. What Schneider's teenage patients often suffer from is exhaustion and stress, fueled by schedules jam-packed with enough school, sports and extracurricular activities to make any college admissions director take notice.

"There's a lot of pressure on the kids," Schneider said. "A lot of it comes from society. A lot of it comes from parents - and what their expectations are."

Wanting the best for your kids is nothing new, but some parents today go too far. In a world where children are increasingly desperate for refuge from a swirl of demands and expectations, experts say that too many moms and dads are turning up the pressure instead.

Even with the best of intentions, some parents end up defining their own success in terms of the achievement of their children - in school, in sports and on the social scene.

Others get caught up in chasing wealth and status, showering children with all the good things privilege has to offer, except the simple gifts of time and attention.

And, many parents get so wrapped up in the quest to create the perfect 21st century vision of an enriching childhood that they go to extremes in managing their children's lives.

Add it all together and you have children who are indulged, but in all the wrong ways, children who are driven to meet higher and higher visions of perfection, children who can end up despondent, frustrated or bitter.

"The world, as it is, has made it incredibly difficult for parents to care for their children," said Jean Adnopoz, an associate professor in the Child Study Center at Yale University School of Medicine. "It is a culture of excitement, of pleasure, of satisfaction, that keeps people running and chasing after something. But they often don't know what they are chasing - so they enlist their children in the chase."

   Post-industrial America is a mobile society, where communities rise and fall with each generation, large corporations shuttle employees from one city to another, and families scatter in search of new opportunities.

As Americans have drifted away from the institutions that used to help them define their place - extended families, familiar neighborhoods, churches, synagogues, steady jobs - they have lost their traditional markers. In their place, many Americans have found a new source of identity: their children.

In the suburbs, the key question is no longer "Where do you go to church?" It's "What team does your kid play for?"

"There is a need for establishing who you are and what you are - and the coin has changed for doing that," Adnopoz said. "Parents are using their kids to establish their position within the social order. It is a way of establishing an order because all the other ways have really fallen by the wayside because we are not in communities anymore."

The result, experts say, is often an over-investment of parents in the successes and failures of their children, which can add layers of stress and anxiety to a child's life. The pressure can rob children of the chance to chart their own course. In extreme cases, children can become saddled with the awesome responsibility of their parents' happiness.

The benign version is visible everywhere: bumper stickers proclaiming "My Child Is an Honors Student," "My Child Was Student of the Month," "My Child Is - Let's Face It - Better Than Your Child." If the lingo of the workplace has permeated myriad aspects of daily living, so, too, has its culture of definable goals and measurable outcomes.

More extreme examples of parents going too far dot the headlines: One dad beats another to death during a hockey practice in Massachusetts. Parents at a youth soccer game in California brawl on the sidelines. A purported child genius is wracked by emotional problems as the news comes out that his mother manufactured many of his achievements.

Wanting better for your children is as American as baseball. It gives parents the will to work long hours. It helps drive the American dream.

But Americans today have so much that it has become frighteningly difficult for many children to "do better" than their parents, especially kids from affluent suburbs. It's Lake Wobegon gone berserk; it's not good enough anymore for all the children to be above average. Now, all the kids need to be exceptional.

"It's getting progressively harder and harder to be the best," said Caitlin Schiller, a 17-year-old from West Hartford. "We have to be good at everything - get better grades, be the smartest, volunteer the most, give the most of your time - and still be a good person."

   Margaret Peterschmidt thought she was just giving her kids what they needed to become well-rounded by filling their days with soccer practice, piano lessons and other activities. Between her two children, now 14 and 11, they had seven activities going.

"I thought the best moms are the ones that provide the way for all these opportunities and paved the way for well-roundedness," said Peterschmidt, who lives in Plymouth, Minn. "Parents do it with the best of intentions."

But, she added, "The best of intentions get people in trouble sometimes."

There is a fine line between wanting the best for your children and insisting they become the best in everything; between giving a child the tools to succeed and refusing to tolerate failure.

Negotiating that line can be tricky, if not impossible. What might have been considered the right balance 20 years ago can now look oppressive to a child who is wrestling with pressures and stresses on so many other fronts.

"Sometimes, the kids will feel their parents are pressuring them, but their parents aren't," Schneider said. "It's their perception."

Jon Goldstein appears to have it all. He's a top student at the exclusive Kingswood-Oxford prep school in West Hartford who drives a sporty Audi A4 to school every day and hopes to attend an elite college.

Cool car. Top school. A future with no limits in sight.

How could a suburban teenager be anything but happy?

But Jon has been wondering lately whose life he's actually been living for the past 18 years: his own, or one he is expected to live?

Even though he knows his parents want the best for him, Jon sometimes looks at his A4 and sees it as compensation - a reward for excelling in school and staying on a course that will lead to unequivocal success.

"You're on a track. You're just expected to do things," Jon said. "You become trapped. What you may want to do becomes lost."

He doesn't doubt that his parents, like most, are simply looking to give their children the opportunity to chase their dreams - whatever they might turn out to be. But, in the context of a frenetic, results-oriented culture, Jon said it is easy for children to believe that their parents' happiness is somehow linked to their performance in school, on the soccer field, at the piano recital.

"They don't want to let their parents down," he said. "They see their parents going off to work every day and being successful, and they want to be successful, too. They want their parents to be proud of them."

These pressures can become so acute that they can contribute to anxiety, anger and other emotional breakdowns in children who feel they are not living up to their parents' expectations, experts say.

Children who have problems may also feel that they're letting their parents down, so they keep their trouble to themselves. Others remain silent because they see how stressed-out their parents are and don't want to add to the trouble.

"Kids often feel their parents have too much on their plates," said Tracy Mott, a therapist in the child and adolescent unit at the Institute of Living in Hartford. "You see that a lot: `I don't want to burden my mom. She's depressed.'"

   Marcie Schneider's office is just off Route 1, a few minutes from the tony shops and boutiques in downtown Greenwich. About three-quarters of the patients who come through her doors have some sort of eating disorder - which often afflicts teenagers who are so overwhelmed that eating becomes the only aspect of their lives they feel they can control.

"They really don't feel good about who they are," Schneider said.

The problem is so severe that three girls at nearby Greenwich High School last year formed a club called Food for Thought to raise awareness about eating disorders.

"Everybody's kids are all-American this and this and this," said Ana Avila, one of the club's founders. "Kids feel they have to look perfect - and kids feel they need to be perfect."

In a survey of 300 sixth- and seventh-graders, a Columbia University researcher found that widespread expectations of perfection - from parents, among others - were driving behavioral problems in affluent suburban children, while emotional isolation from parents compounded the pain.

"If I think my parents value me more for what I accomplish than who I am, I start to desperately need accomplishments for me to feel valuable," said Suniya S. Luthar, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia's Teachers College. "Just the very prospect of not succeeding can be very frightening and anxiety-provoking."

Luthar also found some evidence that stress and anxiety were contributing to the proliferation of drug and alcohol abuse in the suburbs. According to her research, boys and girls in the suburbs use drugs and alcohol far more frequently than their counterparts in the inner city, in some cases by a ratio of almost 2-to-1.

The phenomenon is well-known in upscale communities. The suburban veneer of contentment came crashing down this fall in Scarsdale, N.Y., after a drinking spree at a homecoming dance left five students hospitalized with acute alcohol poisoning. In West Hartford, the death of an 18-year-old in 1997 prompted adults to wonder what was going on with their kids.

In Westchester County, Alec Miller has noticed a distinct shift among the children he treats from the wealthy suburbs of New York. While high demands and expectations have been part of their universe for some time, Miller said the pressure has become more acute over the last 20 years.

"If they're not the best, they don't get into Harvard. And if they're not excelling in all their extracurriculars, they're a failure," said Miller, chief of child and adolescent psychology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. "They're losing sleep. They're anxious. They're tense."

Despite growing evidence of the steep price of perfection, Luthar said it would be unfair to conclude that parents in suburban towns are acting out of malice.

"I will not sit in judgment of any parent and say, `You're doing a bad job,'" Luthar said. "For many of us, I don't think we're aware of many of the risks and pressures that can arise, paradoxically, from trying to do the best for our children."

   So what's a parent to do?

Push your child to excel and you can push him too hard. Step back and let her chart her own course, and you're sleeping on the job.

Let him play all the sports and live the frantic life his friends are living - you're giving in to the crowd. Tell her she can't do it all, and your child feels left out, is at a competitive disadvantage to make varsity, or is at risk of not being able to win admission to the college of her choice.

"The problem is, when the parents go to open school night and hear the guidance counselor talk about how they need all these extracurricular activities, it's hard for parents to say: `Slow down,'" Schneider said.

Eugene D'Angelo, co-director of the child and family psychiatry programs at Children's Hospital in Boston, said he has seen parents with children as young as 5 or 6 who are concerned because the kindergartner isn't as competitive in soccer as the other kids, or they're worried about the quality of their child's play dates.

The kids aren't even in first grade and, already, the parents are afraid they're not measuring up.

"I see sometimes in those situations families come in - they have play date calendars for their kids. This kid's 5, and he's got a calendar," D'Angelo said. "That has a real impact on that kid.

"When you see that kind of apprehension, parents are having tremendous pressure on themselves too, whether it's work-related, community-related, interpersonal. And the pressure to do it right. I think we're giving mixed messages to families at times. We, as a society, haven't figured out what the message is to parents, what the mandate is. It's either too much or too little."

For Margaret Peterschmidt, it only became apparent what the family was missing out on after her children came to her and asked if they could slow down. She readily agreed.

Now, the family spends far more time preparing meals together, playing cards and visiting relatives. With less jammed in to every day, there are fewer blowups over getting homework done on time.

"Our days were complicated and crowded. We inflicted it upon ourselves," Peterschmidt said. "Now, our days are enjoyable. Our time is enjoyable."

When a group of parents in the upscale suburb of Ridgewood, N.J., began to wonder if they, too, were pushing their kids - and families - too far, they organized a townwide night off, free from homework, sports and all extracurricular activities.

Marcia Marra, one of the event's organizers, said it was remarkable to hear from so many parents who said they also felt that something was amiss but were afraid of speaking out.

"Are people feeling pressured? Absolutely," Marra said. "They just believe this is what it is to be a parent in 2002. Maybe I feel a little stressed and uncertain, but maybe that's what being a good parent is."

Annie Zusy, another mother who participated in Ridgewood family night, said she began thinking harder about what was right for each of her three children rather than get swept up in the mind-set that a child needs to be excellent at everything to be a success.

"Our generation has given our children a wonderful gift. We have raised the level of excellence across the board," Zusy said. "But I think that the fallout from what we have done for this generation of our children is we have created all this heavy-duty stress and this overemphasis on making them as perfect little children as they can be."

It's almost like an O. Henry tragedy. Parents are so determined to make sure their kids will be in a position to be successful and happy in the future that they lose sight of the present and what a child needs when she's still a child.

Children are so eager to please their parents in an increasingly competitive world that they become afraid to take chances or to fail. And everyone is running so fast that nobody's stopping to check in and find out what's really going on.

"Stress on kids is really an offshoot of stress in society. Everyone - on all kinds of levels - they all feel the pressure," said Jon Goldstein, the Kingswood-Oxford student. "We're like charged particles, vibrating very fast. We're all rushing to where we're going, but not having any interest in how we're getting there.